Email this article to a friend

The Church of England, which controls over £7bn of investments including large portfolios of agricultural land, has shifted its stance on genetically-modified crops, saying it may allow them to be grown provided it has satisfactory assurance on ethical standards.

The Church has not had a comprehensive policy on GM across all its investments before, a spokesman said.

Its previous policy, introduced in 2000, related chiefly to its status as a large UK landowner, controlling more than 100,000 acres of farmland. In response to public controversy at the time, its ethical investment advisory group ruled out allowing GM crop trials on Church-owned land.

This has fallen easily in line with a generally restrictive approach to the sanctioning of GM crop cultivation by UK and EU regulatory authorities in the past decade. There are currently no commercial GM crops grown in Britain, though research and trials are ongoing.

Rothamsted Research, a government-funded science institute based in Hertfordshire, was the target of public protests last summer when it conducted trial plantings of GM wheat.

However, the Church's investment funds, which include the £5.2bn central Church Commissioners fund, Church pension funds worth about £1bn and a series of other investment funds run on behalf of parishes, have substantial equity portfolios including companies that may be involved in GM and have been diversifying further afield.

In 2011, for example, the Commissioners fund made its first investments in North American timberland and expanded these last year with a joint-venture in the Pacific North West. GM crop cultivation is widespread in North America.

The new policy covers these kinds of investments and recommends that the Church funds should "actively use their position as investors to encourage a careful and precautionary approach to genetic modification that supports the common good".

In a statement, James Featherby, chairman of the ethical advisory group, said there was "no single Christian perspective on genetic modification". The group recognised the benefits of pest-resistence, vitamin supply and improved resilience to drought, he said, but there were "uncertainties about the effects of the application of the technology".

Those controlling Church assets will be obliged to run due diligence tests on investments in farmland and timberland, as well as seeking discussions with companies involved in GM to make sure they are conducting their affairs in a "precautionary" way.

The Church is not imposing a "blanket requirement for forced disposal" if investments do not come up to its standards, but says that it may do so in cases of extreme breach.

It also makes clear that "the cultivation of GM crops on land ... should be restricted to well established GMOs that are broadly accepted in the country concerned".

The Church of England is one of the UK's foremost ethical investment organisations, taking forthright stances on environmental issues, social concerns such as high-interest-rate lending, as well as shareholders' perpetual bugbear – excessive executive pay at top companies.

According to its 2011 ethical investment report, the most recent available, Church funds voted against 35% of executive pay reports at companies they were invested in, and co-ordinated a meeting of charity and other ethical-investment specialists in December of that year to press for pay restraint and reform.